To: poetry@ans.net Subject: strange days still upon us (movie) Date: Fri, 29 Oct 1999 13:13:17 -0400 From: "-Sue B." Content-Type: text Content-Length: 4060 Strange Days ------------ Dudes, will echo my 2 cents on _strange days_ as this film totally rocks. Good pacing and acting; tasty on so many levels. Wonder why it croaked at the box office and is not more popular, even though recommended by Siskel & Ebert. However, Dune also choked at the box office even though it was recommended by Harlan Ellison and other worthy sci-fi writers. Now it is recognized as a significant film of the genre and enjoys a worthy geek following. Too much 'playback', i.e., too much time jacked into virtual reality and not enough time in the real world. Wireheads. People get jacked in and lose touch with reality. The detectives find their bodies rotting in a pool of their own filth with the vid-squid humming on their head. Did not want to stop the flow; infinite test pattern results from a fried lobe and starts with a tiny gerbil of thought ringing the same stale pattern in the creaking habitrail of the mind. You can still intensely fuck a hot chick even though you are a flabby lame asshole. You can fuck a hot chick without ever sullying your wedding ring, claims the sim peddler. The joe in the bar stares off into space, sim-fucking the hottie. At the end of the mind-flick, the sim fades out and he is left sitting in the stale bar smoke alone, drooling, and petting the pocket troll. Post-buzz crash and burn. Utimate letdown via realization of being a pathetic loser. Self loathing. Losing touch with reality but not caring, since even these grasping straws are better than the life without. Constructing a fantasy world out of the playing cards of a flagging ego, pasted together with the artificial goo of a nonexistent date with someone else's ex-lover that you could never have. An addict rides the coaster again, ravaging emotions and laying the nerve bare. People live in the past, not giving a shit, laying on some more false salve, wringing the withered tit. You are not just watching a video; you are living a part of someone's life, complete with the emotional rush of what they are feeling. If I have a profound religious experience and talk to god, will the other wireheads become enlightened by sniffing my CD? I hate it when my psychotic ex-boyfriend has a sim of us fucking and lets me know it. A part of me is vulnerable and in his possession; it's hard to move on with that feeling going on. Ultra-creepy auto-erotic breaking & entering turned to rape and murder by asphyxiation, a black jack. A red jack, likes to spill blood. Snuff footage not for the faint of heart. Criminal wireheads can make money selling their B&E & armed robberies. EMS flunkies and coroners can make money selling the 'farewell' CD off a such wirehead criminals when they drop the final chalupa. Studs make money off their 'best of' scrog collection, volumes I-III. Wouldn't Wilt Chamberlain be proud? Black market beauty. Signing away intellectual/ emotional property or having it stolen from you. Beautiful memories cheapened by gross fucks who would spank off to it for the price of a CD. What if your best memories were in the sale bin at K-Mart? Sick fucks who would jack in to your squid while they are simultaneously strangling you and fucking you up the ass. Just to see themselves in an infinite twisted moebius loop of dominance and power. Like looking at your beautiful self looking at your fabulous self in a shop window as you go by, you can see yourself fucking you up the ass while you're feeling your cock ramming yourself up the ass. Multi-dimensional rape. Maybe the rapist makes you wear his squid to see if a weak pathetic sheep can handle the killer's viewpoint, intensity, and drive for blood. Juliette Lewis is visceral in this film with her hard mouth, hard body, and beady paranoid eyes. Intense, angry, crafty, driving, and coldly logical. Paranoia is just reality with a finer grain. You just have to be paranoid _enough_ to believe it. Tasty acting, pacing, and soundtrack. Film is an adrenaline rush.